Frankie Barnet: Short Take on Marius Kociejowski
Pebble Chance, The: Feuilletons and Other Prose. Marius Kociejowski. Biblioasis (2014) The Pebble Chance is a collection of personal essays written by Canadian-born poet, essayist and travel writer Marius Kociejowski, which largely focuses on his experience in the book trade. Jociejowski’s charming enthusiasm will be especially contagious to his fellow anglophiles, with light and quirky...
Short Take on Margaux Williamson
I Could See Everything The Paintings of Margaux Williamson, Coach House 2014 What I know about painting has been gleaned from looking at paintings, an art form that by now often feels like knitting. The way that Impressionism was a response to Realism. How does painting respond to the ubiquitous digital image? What I want...
Cory Collins: Short Take on Altar for the Bourgeoisie
Altar for the Bourgeoisie is the eponymous drawing from Michael Young's Coruscant Altars, exhibited in 2011 at The Rooms in St. John's, the cultural complex that houses Newfoundland and Labrador's provincial art gallery. Created as part of work from his Elbow Room residency, Altar for the Bourgeoisie showcases the tropes of excess among the rich...
Mary Ruefle: Trances of the Blast
Various. Precise. Small openings. A journey from one side of the hour to the other. This is not a review. This is also a movement. Like walking into spring while carrying two small dogs under arm and balancing ice cream cones. I thought, this is a cool noise, like ice cracking under the sand. Or...
Jason Freure: Two Short Takes on Eckerlin & Laporte
In Jesse Eckerlin's We Are Not the Bereaved (Frog Hollow Press, 2012), the land is a board game with no one left around who knows how to play it, except for the backwater hicks and storied eccentrics who cling like moss from another century to modern PEI. Eckerlin imagines the countryside as a space of...
Chantale Potié Short Take on Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture
BEAT NATION: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture MACM, October 17 2013 – January 5 2014 By Chantale Potié I see the colour red and think of a beating heart, of red velvet cake, of ladybugs, of my road bike, my son’s bike, his Halloween fireman costume, of Swedish berries, and my favourite shirt which...
Laura Bast: Short Takes on Toews & Gill
A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews This book has (accurately) been called “darkly funny.” It’s also got a definite CanLit feel. There are flashbacks. It’s set in a small town. This town is oppressive. And nine years after publication it’s still popular, largely thanks to the darkly funny narrator, Nomi. Something’s not quite right with...
Sina Queyras: Short Take on I Don’t Feel So Good
And also of the energy between paragraphs. The energy of white space. Here is Liz Bachinsky quoting Richard Ford on the torque that happens in a story when the author finds a way to make the implausible, plausible. I have been wondering about this torque. What makes a poem inhabitable? What makes the space plausible?...
David Huebert: Three Short Takes, The Virtues of Poetry, Super Sad True Love Story and Under the Keel
The Virtues of Poetry. Can an academic monograph make you tremble and shudder, sweat and cackle, tingle and swell? Can it move you more than any piece of fiction or poetry you’ve encountered in the past year? Before I read The Virtues of Poetry, I didn’t think so. This is not, however, a typical academic...
Tiana Reid: Two Short Takes, Caribana: African Roots and Continuities and Omeros
Caribana: African Roots and Continuities - Race, Space and the Poetics of Moving, M. NourbeSe Philip. Poui Publications, 1996. Toronto’s summers, its orderly heat, are peppered with the near-weekly festival, not quite a coming-together for the city’s inhabitants, but perhaps a call to revel in the “what-once-was” of a less tourist-centered cultural agenda. Writing in...
Jacqueline Valencia: Two Short Takes, Upstream Color and Sound Of My Voice
Film: Upstream Color Director: Shane Carruth Writer: Shane Carruth Cast: Amy Seimetz, Shane Carruth, Andrew Sensenig, Country: USA Year: 2013 Upstream Color is the latest sci-fi offering by Primer director Shane Carruth. After Kris (played seamlessly by Amy Semeteiz) endures an abuse, she must learn how to rebuild her life and ultimately her identity. She...
Adam Sol: Short Take on Lists
Short Take on Lists, Adam Sol Nicholas Papaxanthos’ short piece on Dean Young made me think of another user of lists, Don McKay. Young and McKay are very different poets, but they both have a tendency to “pile on.” As Papaxanthos observes, Young’s triplets are “purposely leaving something out,” to force us to make connections...
